Table Of ContentEducational Justice
Liberal Ideals,
Persistent Inequality,
and the Constructive Uses of Critique
Michael S. Merry
Educational Justice
Michael S. Merry
Educational Justice
Liberal Ideals, Persistent Inequality,
and the Constructive Uses of Critique
Michael S. Merry
Departments of Education
and Philosophy
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ISBN 978-3-030-36022-1 ISBN 978-3-030-36023-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36023-8
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Education, like religion, is conservative. It makes haste slowly only,
and sometimes not at all.
—Carter Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (1933)
Once more, for
Nicholas, Sophia and Peter
F
oreword
In Educational Justice, Michael Merry challenges taken-for-granted
views about what constitutes a just school system. The book is impres-
sive not only in the clarity and forcefulness of his arguments but also in
the wealth of empirical, especially sociological, knowledge he brings to
bear on his philosophical thinking. This gives his work a rootedness in
the actualities of educational institutions that philosophy of education of
a more self-contained sort lacks.
The challenges he introduces are especially directed at egalitarian
liberal positions, many of which he sees as unreflectingly reproducing
received opinion about such things as public education, inclusion, diver-
sity, selection, and religious schools. As a philosophical liberal myself, I
have found Merry’s general approach and many of his specific arguments
of great interest since they sometimes question beliefs I have held in
these areas for a long time. It is not often that philosophers of education
cast radical doubt on the paradigms within which people think. What
enables Michael Merry to do this is to no small extent his immersion in
the messy, empirical realities. His method of challenging egalitarian lib-
eral views of a more dogmatic sort about education involves mounting
conceptual critiques on the one hand, and confronting defenders of an
idealized ‘public school’ with a battery of facts about school systems and
about students’ and parents’ experience of them on the other.
I will say more about Merry’s challenges in a moment. Although
his Educational Justice is a very different kind of book from David
Runciman’s recent How Democracy Ends (Profile Books 2018), it has
ix
x FOREWORD
struck me, having recently read both works, that they share something
in common. In his book, Runciman reveals his doubts about the survival
of democracy over the longer term. Among his reasons is that people in
older democracies in North America, Europe and elsewhere have, over
the last century, become so used to this form of politics that they take its
continuing existence for granted. This has put them less on their guard
than they should be in dealing with new forces that may be undermining
it, whether social, like disaffection with the political system, economic,
like powerful internet-based corporations such as Facebook, or technolog-
ical, like the growth of intelligent and perhaps uncontrollable machines.
Like Runciman, Merry jolts us out of habitual ways of looking at
things. But while Runciman’s concern is with factual matters—how
democracies die and whether their death is inevitable, Merry’s is with
the philosophical question of how best to conceive a just school system.
To answer it, he claims, we need a radical critique of some beliefs that
many egalitarian liberals among us hold. Among these is the belief that
ordinary, public—in the American sense of non-private—schools are best
suited to further the democratic ideal of justice. Much of Merry’s book
submits this kind of educational stance—about the public school as the
key to fair educational provision—to stringent critique. Here are three
illustrations.
Defenders of the public school want to preserve it from privatization,
arguably exemplified by charter schools in the United States and acade-
mies in England. Only the public school, they believe, can form students
as good citizens, is capable of democratic governance, offers equality of
opportunity, etc. Merry’s target is ‘the “faith” in public schooling that
refuses critique’. While he himself favors public schooling provided that
it does in fact deliver an equitable and worthwhile education, he is fully
aware, in a way that ideological defenders in his view are not, of the
shortcomings of public schools as they are in reality and not in some nos-
talgic or utopian vision.
One of the foremost arguments for public schools, not least in the
United States, is that in promoting racial and social class integration they
help to bring about a more just democratic society. Once again, Merry
forces the reader to reconsider that claim. While a minority of disadvan-
taged students benefit from being taught alongside more privileged class-
mates, get to university, and do well in life, the evidence suggests that
integrated schools fall far short of what many want to believe to be the
case.
FOREWORD xi
This theme overlaps with Merry’s views on religious schools. His
focus here is the antipathy that many liberals feel toward them, since the
education they provide is likely to be indoctrinatory. Yet again he aims
to shake us out of our dogmatic slumber. He accepts the charge of likely
indoctrination, but then asks whether indoctrination is always, all things
considered, something to be avoided. He takes as his focus Islamic
schools. Like some racial minority or working-class students, many
Muslim students feel more comfortable and secure learning in the com-
pany of young people like themselves. Based on telling evidence of the
stigmatic harm that many Muslims suffer in ‘integrated’ schools, Merry’s
view is that indoctrination may well be the lesser evil.
These three examples give a flavor of the approach Michael Merry
adopts throughout this book. For me, the latter also prompts more gen-
eral reflections about egalitarian liberals in education. An implication of
his argument is that these cover a spectrum of different positions. Some
have an ideological prejudice in favor of the common or public school
that blinds them to its institutional defects. Others—and here I hope I
can include myself—are strongly inclined in favor of it, but in a less dog-
matic way. Yet others, including, I think, Merry himself, believe that edu-
cational justice often requires a more pragmatic approach, marked by a
minimal initial predisposition toward a ‘common school’ ideal, without
failing to recognize that this ideal often fails to satisfy the necessary con-
ditions for justice, particularly for the more marginalized and vulnerable.
John White
Emeritus Professor
University of London
London, UK
A
cknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of individuals who either read
individual chapters, or, in a few cases, the entire manuscript. Krista
Goldstine-Cole, Enzo Rossi, Sally Scholz, Jeffrey Brown, Chris Turner,
Jessica Payton, Gijs Donselaar, Robbie McClintock, John White, Clive
Harbor, Veit Bader, Tommie Shelby, Andrew Mason, Don Weenink,
Yossi Dahan, Bart van Leeuwen, Lucas Swaine, Anders Schinkel, Darren
Chetty and Ron Sundstrom. I owe Bill New a special debt of gratitude
for our brainstorming sessions a few years back, and also for his support-
ive role during the early phases of the writing. A very warm thanks to
you. I also owe a special thanks to Richard Arum, for his co-authoring
the material in Chapter 8. I am also grateful to Taylor & Francis for per-
mission to reuse material from ‘Is the Liberal Defence of Public Schools
a Fantasy?’ Critical Studies in Education 58, 3: 373–389; ‘Can Schools
Teach Citizenship?’ Discourse 41, 1; ‘Do Inclusion Policies Deliver
Educational Justice for Autistic Students?’ Journal of School Choice
14, 1; Wiley for permission to reuse material from ‘Is Diversity Necessary
for Educational Justice?’ Educational Theory 64, 3: 205–225; and Sage
for permission to reuse material from ‘Indoctrination, Islamic schools
and the Broader Scope of Harm’. Theory and Research in Education
16, 2: 162–178 and ‘Can Schools Fairly Select Their Students?’ Theory
and Research in Education 16, 3: 330–350. I also am particularly grate-
ful to various audiences where I presented some of this work and where
I received helpful feedback from those present: New York University,
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